They might not get mail every day,but they’re sure to be on Facebook

With populations in every demographic online, marketers are usingdata scaling and geotargeting to get to those hard-to-reach audiences

Ad Age is working with Esri and the Patchwork
Nation, tracking 11 families in 11 representative U.S.
counties to examine the impact of demographic
and economic change on American consumers.
For more on the project, go to AdAge.com/consumer.

■ BY MATT CARMICHAEL

mcarmichael@adage.com

Which types of websites are most popular in the areas Ad Age is tracking

IT’S HARD FOR marketers to reach
Dale. After the planting and harvesting
on his Montana wheat farm comes the
hauling to market—60 to 70 trips into
town, at 900 bushels a trip.

“We’re putting in 12-, 13- and14-hour days here during the sum-mer,” Dale said. “A 40-hour weekmight be Tuesday.”His farm in Teton County is soremote that it gets postal service justthree times a week, so circulars don’thave the same impact.

“I don’t get the Sunday paper untilMonday, and it always sucks whenMonday is a holiday,” Dale said. “ThenI’ll get Sunday’s, Monday’s andTuesday’s paper on Tuesday.”But brands have a new way to reachDale, who’s sure to check Facebook acouple of times a day.

Time spent online varies widely by
location, according to an exclusive set
of data provided by ComScore for the
American Consumer Project.

People in large urban areas such as
Manhattan (Patchwork Nation’s
Industrial Metropolis and Esri’s Solo
Acts segments) can spend 30% more
time online than those in rural areas
such as Teton County (Tractor
Country/Factories and Farms). People
with farm or factory jobs aren’t sitting
at a computer eight hours a day, and
they probably don’t have great cellular
coverage.

The ComScore data also reinforce
what common sense tells us: High-income suburbs such as Howard
County, Md., (Monied ‘Burbs/High
Society) overindex on time spent
online and on most categories of sites
we reviewed. They are voracious consumers of both traditional and digital
media, from the printed page to their
iPads. They’re prototypical multiscreen
households.

Facebook is the great equalizer. The
index values show only a few points of
variation, making it the most evenly
used site of more than 2,000 tracked in
the ComScore data.

“We’re at a point where the [social-media] market is pretty mature,” said
Andrew Lipsman, VP-industry analysis at ComScore. In just a handful of
years, social media—and Facebook in
particular—has grown to track with
search in its ubiquity among all demographics.

In October alone, Americans spent
136,000 cumulative years on Facebook.
Each of the 11 households we’re tracking use Facebook, most of them daily.

Basha, a 75-year-old computer-pho-bic empty nester with an AOL.com
email address, uses the social-network-ing site to check in on her grandkids.
Michael, an affluent African-American
in New York County (Manhattan), is
the only one without his own

AUCTIONS (example: eBay)

50% ABOVE AVERAGEAVERAGE

50% BELOW AVERAGE

ENTERTAINMENT (examples: Youtube, MTV)

50% ABOVE AVERAGEAVERAGE

50% BELOW AVERAGE

NEWS/INFORMATION (examples: New York Times, CNN, Yahoo News)

50% ABOVE AVERAGEAVERAGE

50% BELOW AVERAGE

RETAIL (examples: Target, Walmart, Amazon)

50% ABOVE AVERAGEAVERAGE

50% BELOW AVERAGE

SPORTS (examples: ESPN, NFL)

50% ABOVE AVERAGEAVERAGE

50% BELOW AVERAGE

Source: ComScore.

Facebook page, but his “friends” have
connected through his partner’s
account. Michael checks it more than
his partner does.

It’s logical, then, that marketers are
using Facebook to reach both broad and
extremely targeted audiences.

When the Communications
Workers of America wanted to get its
message in front of Congress, it worked
with Blue State Digital to use publicly
available information to target policy-makers’ profiles. It’s not hard to do.
Targeting has gotten that good.

“Five years ago the walled gardenswere the richest sources of informa-tion,” said Theresa LaMontagne, man-aging director-analytics and insight atMEC. “Now data is scaling so muchthat you are able to do it outside.”Whether it’s the Zappos ad that fol-lows people around the web because ofa product they recently searched for orthe Groupon banner that calls out aviewer’s hometown, ads targeting con-sumer behavior and geography aregaining prominence.

Dale is always checking auction sites
for deals on farm equipment and spare
parts. Over the holidays a friend with
Amazon Prime talked him into making
his first purchase—a percolator coffee
pot—on the site. He’s not hooked, part-ly because he perceives it would be a
hassle to return anything.

Geotargeting has made reaching
these areas much simpler. Ms.
LaMontagne said that planners can
bypass local media websites, which are
often thin on content, for mainstream
sites such as Yahoo and AOL.

The ComScore data have also
uncovered interesting correlations.
Areas that index high on The New
York Times sites don’t tend to shop at
Hot Topic. FoxNews.com readers visit
Forever21.com and underindex on
Amazon and Abercrombie & Fitch.
Overtargeting has its dangers, of
course, as most marketers aren’t interested in reaching an audience of one.